Paying Attention

11:54, and he's dead.

Actually, he was pronounced dead at 10:25.  In case the details matter.

Seemingly, they do.

Down at Lucasville, while the soon-to-be-murdered waits in his holding cell, a series of guards keep a minute-by-minute logbook of what he's doing.  Here's a randomly chosen page from one to give you the idea.

12:54.  He's still dead.

He'll be dead at 1:54 and 2:54, though I'll have posted this well before then.

And he'll still be dead tomorrow and next week and next year.

They kept a meticulous time line for Clarence Carter, too.  That's what they do.

Want some details? He took a shower this morning.  He declined breakfast.  He at some dates last night. He shaved his head.

Had they paid similar attention in the Hamilton County Jail, Johnny Allen would never have been killed.  Instead, the guards ignored or just didn't notice a 25 minute fight between Allen and Clarence Carter.

Allen lost, died from the beating he suffered.  And now we've killed Carter.

No, what the guards didn't do at the Hamilton County Jail isn't equivalent to what Carter did.  But it should still matter to us.  And it should have mattered to any fair evaluation of what we were going to do to Carter.

It didn't.

And so we killed him this morning.

After watching, meticulously.

Yesterday's press reports indicated that no members of Allen's family were planning to watch the killing.  Today, it's reported, his mother gave what may be part of the answer.

But the victim's mother, Helen L. Bonner, said in a statement, "I have no animosity against him and I have forgiven him for taking my child from me...I am glad that justice is finally served, but my forgiveness toward him will never ease the pain of the loss of my son Johnny."

No animosity.  Forgiveness.

Ah, but justice.

Meticulously measured.  Carefully watched.

Now, when it's too late.

Clarence Carter.  Pronounced dead at 10:25 this morning at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.

Under the careful eye of prison guards.  Indeed, at their hands. 

* * * * *

By the way, no state has, so far this year, executed as many people as has Ohio.

We're No. 1!  We're No. 1!

And we're keeping track.

Three for Three

Clarence Carter is due to be murdered by the State of Ohio in five days.

Governor Kasich could have chosen to save his life.  He could also have chosen to save the lives of Frank Spisak and Johnnie Baston.  He chose, instead, to ensure that they would be killed.

Today, he made the same choice about Clarence Carter.

04.07.11, Carter Clemency

Carter may or may not have intended to kill Johnny Allen.  Kasich's intent is clear, though he pretends to have no blood on his hands.

I'm not religious, but if I were, on whose soul, exactly, would I be asking god to have mercy? 

It Springs Eternal, Part 2 - Too Tenuous To Take a Man's Life

Just after midnight, I put up a post about how civil rights lawyer Al Gerhardstein and former Director of the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction had together written a letter to Governor Kasich urging him to stop the execution of Clarence Carter, now scheduled for April 12.

I put out the undisputed facts of the case: Carter was in the Hamilton County jail waiting to be sentenced for a murder when he killed another inmate, Johnny Allen.  And I quoted, from Alan Johnson's article in the Columbus Dispatch, these lines from the letter Gerhardstein and Collins sent to Kasich.

"It is much more likely that this was an inmate fight that got tragically out of hand," Collins and Gerhardstein wrote. "Inmate-on-inmate violence in lockups is often pursued to establish oneself as fearsome and to deter others from threatening or attacking the inmate."

Johnson has done a terrific job over the years reporting on the death penalty in Ohio.  But he's a reporter who has to distill so he grabbed a key line from the letter, the killing wasn't planned.  There's much more.  In fact, they offer 7 specific reasons why Kasich should commute the sentence.

1. There's no evidence that the killing was planned.
2. Carter had a knife, but didn't use it, which he surely could have if he just wanted to kill Allen.
3. The key prosecution witnesses were snitches who traded false testimony for leniency.  Their claims that Carter started the fight with Allen are simply false.  In fact, Allen "actually provoked the battle."
4. The jury never heard the evidence that Allen provoked the fight.  There's a good chance it would have made a difference in the verdict.
5. The fight lasted 25 minutes.  Had guards intervened earlier, Allen would probably not have been killed.
6. Herb Brown, the retired Ohio Supreme Court Justice who wrote the opinion affirming the conviction and death sentence believes that the sentence should be commuted to LWOP.
7. A wealth of mitigation evidence that could have been presented was not.

LWOP, death in prison, wasn't an option for the jury.  (The sentencing choices were different then.)  It is an option for the Governor.

Still, Clarence Carter's no saint, and Johnny Allen shouldn't have been killed.  That's easy.  The question, as always, is what to do.

Governor's always profess to struggle with these questions.  Mostly, they're lying when they say that.  But sometimes, and in Ohio, . . . 

This from the penultimate paragraph of the letter.

Former Ohio Governor Michael DiSalle, chronicles his clemency decisions in, The Power of Life and Death. The murder conviction of Richard Rutherford hinged on the testimony of one witness, the girlfriend of the defendant.  She had changed her story several times and this weighed heavily on the governor, "Although I did not wish to impugn her character, her motives, or her way of life, her frequently changed stories provide evidence too tenuous to justify taking a man's life." (p. 77).

Yeah.

The Dispatch didn't publish the whole letter, which is a shame.  With thanks to Al Gerhardstein for sending it to me, here it is.

Gerhardstein Collins Letter

It Springs Eternal - With Update

Al Gerhardstein is a civil rights lawyer, and a good one.  For years, a substantial part of his practice has been suing the prison system in Ohio over various sorts of misconduct and brutality.  He, far more than almost anyone else on the outside, knows how prisons work and what goes on behind the concertina wire.

Terry Collins worked for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction for years.  When he retired, he was the Director, overseeing the entire state prison system.

They aren't what you'd call natural allies.

So when the two of them join together, well, it's probably worth paying attention.

Clarence Carter, while in the Hamilton County jail waiting to be sentenced for aggravated murder, killed Johnny Allen.  He, in turn, is to be murdered on April 12 at the death house in the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Ohio.  The Parole Board said to do it.  The Courts aren't likely to intervene at this point (though one never knows).  Mostly what's left is the hope that John Kasich, having signed off on the murders of two men already this year will be disinclined to sponsor the killing of a third.

It's pretty evanescent that thing called hope.  We want to grab hold, but there's nothing to grasp.

And then Gerhardstein and Collins, speaking as one, give us a hint of something solid.

Alan Johnson, in the Columbus Dispatch, reports that they wrote a letter to Governor Kasich.  Both signed it.  They told him that there's simply no reason to think Carter's was a planned, premeditated killing.

"It is much more likely that this was an inmate fight that got tragically out of hand," Collins and Gerhardstein wrote. "Inmate-on-inmate violence in lockups is often pursued to establish oneself as fearsome and to deter others from threatening or attacking the inmate."

Yeah.  That's what happens.  It's not right.  It's not good.  (And, by the way, they were at it for 25 minutes before a guard intervened.)  But it's not the kind of crime we're inclined to think of as the worst of the worst, which is what the death penalty is, supposedly, for.

It's not likely the letter will change anything.  Kasich has made clear that he has no qualms about killing, and Carter's ultimately an easy case for that.

But what Gerhardstein and Collins demonstrate is that even the easy cases aren't so easy.  This business of figuring out who really should live and who really should die, it's tough.  And if you take it seriously, well, it's impossible.

Which is one reason we ought to give it up.

Until then, and while we wait, there remains what Emily Dickinson called "the thing with feathers."

Hope     

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

UPDATE
I've just posted, here, the complete Gerhardstein/Collins letter to Governor Kasich, along with additional commentary (tough, it's my blog).

A Murder Planned, An Innocent Man, The FBI on the Job

I was going to write about Clarence Carter who's got an execution date of April 12.  Actually, that's not right.  

I wasn't going to write about Carter.  I was going to write about how the Parole Board reviewed things in 2007 before Carter's planned murder and by a vote of 6-3 recommended that Governor Ted have him killed.  That didn't happen for reasons having nothing to do with the Parole Board or Governor Ted.  Instead the courts got in the way and stopped the killing.  Anyhow they've rescheduled and so the Parole Board took another swing at it.

Nothing much has changed.  Carter still killed James Allen back in 1988.  He still apologizes to Allen's family.  He still says he's remorseful.  He still says he's learned that "violence is not the answer."  The jury still didn't hear anything about his turbulent background.  The jury still didn't have some of the corroboration of conflicting testimony regarding just how the altercation between Carter and Allen began or who started it.  Herb Brown, the former Ohio Supreme Court Justice who wrote the opinion affirming Carter's conviction and death sentence still doesn't think death is the appropriate sentence.  Carter's adjustment to prison remains about the same - not perfect, but not terrible.  The jury still didn't have the option, back at the time of the trial, of sentencing Carter to life without parole.

And since nothing has changed to make Carter more fitting now for murder than he was four years ago, it's not immediately evident why this time, in 2011, the Parole Board voted unanimously to recommend that he be killed.  

Oh, yeah, there's one thing that's different now.  Two of the Parole Board members who voted for life back in  2007 are no longer on the Board.  And the third, Ellen Venters, switched her vote.

That's what I was going to write about.

*******

Or maybe I was going to write about how Thomas Haynesworth doesn't hate the women who wrongly identified him as the man who raped them.  Oh, sure, he spent 27 years in prison on their mistaken say so (DNA indicates that the rapist was one Leon Davis), but he can't blame them he told Maria Glod for the Washington Post.

“They have been through a tragedy,” he said. “What happened to them shouldn’t have happened to them. I blame the person who did this, Mr. Davis.”

One of the women Haynesworth didn't rape is less magnanimous toward herself.

On the day that two detectives showed up at the Henrico woman’s house in March 2009, she felt a rush of fear. Haynesworth, she thought, must have made parole.
But the officers started talking about DNA and evidence. She began to understand what they were saying: DNA had cleared Haynesworth and implicated a convicted rapist named Leon Davis.
Suddenly her mind was transported back to one of the most painful days of her life, a day she spent years trying to put behind her. But now the man she long thought of as a brutal attacker, a criminal, had become a victim, too.
She wept. For the first time, she told her children that she had been raped. She wanted to reach out to friends, but it never felt like the right time to broach the subject. And she struggled to remember each detail of her identification of Haynesworth.
“I’ve gone through it 100 times in my head,” she said. “Was there any point where there was a clue? Did something not make sense to me that should have been a red flag?”
She has found none.

The Henrico woman ticks off the milestones of the past 27 years of her life. Marriage, raising children, holidays, family vacations. Haynesworth, she thinks, has been robbed of all of that.
“All these things go through your head,” she said. “The Mother’s Days that he’s missed. Just thinking what would I do if my son was torn away from me, or if my daughter was torn away from me.”

She knows that Haynesworth has said he feels no anger toward her, and she said knowing that comforts her. She knows he wants to get a job as a mechanic. And she hopes to meet him someday.
“I hope that he is able to pick up his life and have nothing but great things happen from this point on out,” she said.

This is virtually a carbon copy the story of Jennifer Thompson-Canino and Ronald Cotton.  It's a story of uncommon decency all around.  And enormous suffering.

And of a system that's seriously fucked up.

And maybe I was going to write about that.

*******

But then Anna D sent me the news that simply emphasizes what we already know.

The zeal of those who would keep us safe is matched only by their incompetence.

Have you tried to enter a government building lately?  Tried to get on a plane?  Tried to pass through security?

• Empty pockets.
• Take off shoes.
• Remove coat.
• Place all objects on conveyor belt.
• Get naked for the cameras and the amusement of the guards.
• Submit to sexual assault.
• Bend over and spread 'em.
• And for godssake, if you see something, say something.  

And so it came to pass that in late February a private contract guard at a federal office building in Detroit found a package outside the building.  He brought it inside for safe keeping. Put it in the lost and found.  Last week someone decided that maybe the package should be x-rayed.  You know, like all the other stuff that entered the building.

Ooops.

That bomb sat in the Lost and Found for three weeks.

Yep.

Bomb.

Lost and Found.

Next to the odd gloves and the broken umbrellas and a couple of scarfs and some kid's backpack.

Three weeks.

Detroit police said they recovered a package on Friday from the federal building and detonated it.

After three weeks.

The FBI, you'll be comforted to know, is investigating.  Which is only appropriate.  

Their office is in that building.